Thursday, September 15, 2016

Creating search based solutions and troubleshooting search in SharePoint Online takes time. Time and money more wisely spent on the actual solutions themselves. Over time I’ve discovered two major gaps when we moved from on-premises to online: Being able to run full crawl when we change the search schema and being able to investigate and look at the crawl log.

'SharePoint Online does not allow the same control as SharePoint 2013/2016, but there are ways. Previously I’ve created PowerShell scripts to trigger re-indexing of content and user profiles, and you can actually via e-Discovery get access to the SharePoint Online crawl log, but this also expose all your content – something you might not want to give out to anyone.

Hence, I started developing SharePoint Online Search Toolbox. The application gives you a UI to view the crawl log, much like you can on-premises, and it also allows you to trigger re-indexing of user profiles or content tenant wide. The app is distributed on subscription, per tenant but if you’re like me and my colleagues at Puzzlepart, you should quickly save this when a search issue arise.

If people value the application, and have suggestions for features, they might just be added :)